Abstract
Public administration has to prepare itself to deliver fully integrated eGovernment services. This delivery often requires cooperation via business processes interoperability across two or more departments. In this context, public departments and agencies need to implement interoperability using enterprise architecture techniques to structure business processes, and service oriented models to achieve their integration. Thus, it's quite interesting to adopt enterprise architecture paradigm and techniques to analyse, track and control the evolution degree of processes interoperability from the existing "as-is" state to the future "to-be" state. The present paper proposes a periodic monitoring approach based on an assessment method which considers three main aspects of interoperation: 1. Potentiality, reflecting the preparation to interoperate. The objective is to foster interoperation readiness by eliminating barriers that may obstruct the interaction. 2. Compatibility, referring to interoperation implementation through adequate engineering process. It aims to study the relation between the external interfaces of processes and the surrounding environment in order to ensure effective interaction. 3. Performance efficiency, focusing on monitoring operational performance. It consists of the availability assessment of the communication infrastructure and the supporting system in general. It considers also end users satisfaction of interoperation in use. The proposed method supporting tool, (IMT) for interoperability monitoring tool, assesses interoperability degree periodically through five steps: (i) Delineating the scope of interoperation; (ii) Quantifying the interoperation potentiality; (iii) Calculating the compatibility degree; (iv) Evaluating the operating performance; (v) Aggregating the degree of interoperability. In addition to its capacity to track the evolution of interoperation degree in time, the IMT measures the required effort to reach a planned degree of interoperability. Finally, to better illustrate how to use the proposed interoperability monitoring approach, we present a practical example of integrated public eService. It's a citizen oriented eService proposed by a public hospital that offers special fees for persons covered by social security insurances. It includes government to business collaboration and government to government one.